


But the Spark

by buckstiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Fluff, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 07:11:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1596125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Bucky have missed seventy years' worth of music. It's a situation they need to fix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But the Spark

**Author's Note:**

> I could really think about these two discovering pop culture for the rest of my life and never get bored. Hence this. 
> 
> Title from the poem "To Be Alive" by Gregory Orr.

i.

Tony was tired of hearing scratchy records crooning out old jazz tunes from Steve and Bucky’s corner of Avengers Tower, so one day he showed up to their door with a stack of “Now That’s What I Call Music” CDs, dropping them unceremoniously in Bucky’s arms. 

“Please and thank you,” he said with an edge of deadpan before walking away. 

Steve came back to their apartment to find Bucky glowering at their record player and trying to get the needle to slide into the rainbow-hued shimmer. 

“Something went wrong while we were frozen.” 

In the back of his head, Steve thought about how things could be two things at once, how CDs could be both too advanced and outdated to fit in their hands.

ii.

Clint hadn’t seen such determined gazes directed toward a screen since the last time Natasha had found a computer program she couldn’t hack in under five minutes, and that time, there was no faint thumping bass shivering through his yet-unbuttered toast. Nor were there two nonagenarian super soldiers sharing earbuds with pens hovering over legal pads. 

He wasn’t even sure if they knew he was there.

“What the hell does ‘slizzered’ mean?” Bucky muttered. 

“I’ll write it down. What song is this again?” 

“Does it matter?”

“I want to make the glossary as detailed as I can.”

“Of course you do.”

For a few minutes, the only sound was the crunch of the toast between Clint’s teeth.

“‘Yang?’” Steve said suddenly, assumedly pressing pause. “Did he just say ‘yang’?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Bucky frowned. “The song’s ‘Wild Wild Love,’ by the way.”

“All right...by who again? Dachshund? Husky?” 

“Pitbull. You were close.”

Clint tried not to choke on his orange juice.

iii.

Bucky thought that he was being subtle when he smuggled the large package from the tower lobby up to his room, but his frame was unable to hide it as he shuffled past the conference room where Tony was showing Bruce his latest Big Science Breakthrough. 

A few hours later, they heard cautious guitar chords stumble from beneath the door of the apartment. Bruce smirked.

That night, when Bruce was waiting for Steve to fetch him the last of his Girl Scout Cookies (“Take them before I eat them all in one go!”), he heard more the chords again from Bucky’s room, more confident, followed by a quiet voice singing--

“This is the first day of my life...swear I was born right in the doorway…”

Steve’s footsteps returning from the pantry cut the serenade short.

iv.

Steve returned from his morning run expecting to find the door to Bucky’s room still locked shut, but as soon as he stepped over the threshold, he felt Bucky’s metal fingers latch around his arm, pulling him in towards the kitchen counter where their shared laptop was displaying the latest Pandora station he had grown attached to. 

“Bucky, are you wearing eyeliner?” 

“Natasha let me borrow some. Listen,” he said, practically shoving Steve’s face toward the screen. “Pop punk.” He pressed play and leaped back, jumping erratically to the beat and screaming along clumsily to the lyrics. 

“AM I MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR YET--”

Steve stared wide-eyed for the rest of the song, halfway thinking about Bucky’s smooth singing before he was shipped off to Europe, his near-perfect pitch--but the song changed, and in the interim Bucky caught his eye, pulled at the collar of his plain black t-shirt. 

“Didn’t you ever listen to Fall Out Boy after you thawed out?”

“No, not really.”

He stepped back to the laptop and found the song on YouTube with much more skill than Steve had had after his reintroduction to the world. “Let’s listen to it again.” 

By the third go round, Steve was jump-singing alongside him, and the other Avengers at dinner lightly mentioned something about the stampede of elephants upstairs.

v. 

They never quite got the hang of CDs, but Tony was able to redirect them to lists of Top 40 hits for the past twenty years. 

The next day, Natasha watched Steve amble by with a bounce in his step singing One Direction tunes under his breath, and not thirty seconds later did Tony march past her from where Steve just went.

“I fucked up. I fucked up bad.”

vi.

“Wait, wait--listen to this one.”

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon and they were nursing bruises from the mission the day before. Doors to all their apartments remained shut, and Bucky and Steve had taken to sprawling on the floor, laying on the couch cushions, playing their favorite songs that they had discovered for each other.

“Who’s this one by?” Bucky asked.

“The Avett Brothers. ‘Laundry Room.’”

The guitar plucked its way through the speakers and over the couch cushions. 

“I like this,” Bucky murmured. “It’s nice.” 

They laid in silence for a few moments until the end, the lyric “I am a breathing time machine” spreading slowly through their skin, and suddenly Bucky was laughing, laughing until teardrops hung on the edge of his eyes. 

“Did you choose this one on purpose?” he finally sputtered out.

“Maybe.” Steve hid his grin by staring back up at the ceiling while Bucky covered his face, slowly regaining composure. 

vii.

Some days, more than any of them--Steve especially--would like, Bucky locks himself in his room for hours on end, through meals and debriefings and movie nights, and the only sound that bursts through the walls are grating screams and rough guitar riffs. 

Sometimes, when he emerges, he quietly asks JARVIS where he could find a tool to fix the wall or the best place to buy a new lamp. 

His face is scrubbed red-raw and his eyeliner is always freshly-applied. 

viii. 

Steve doesn’t sing well--the serum couldn’t fix everything, after all, but the point truly hit home when Bucky showed up with their Chipotle for dinner and found him singing tinny and off-key to some atrocious bubblegum neon pop. 

“Buck! You’re home!” 

“Uh-huh.”

“Can you believe we missed the eighties?!”

He can, and he’s glad. 

ix.

Bucky had wanted to go out dancing for months, even against everyone else’s warnings. It’s not the same as how you remember it--not much was, he countered. We don’t want the loud noises and crowds to set off a possible episode--if the movies were fine, the club was fine. They finally wore down when they had a long weekend in DC, he picked the venue, and, as everyone had expected, the scene was a bit of a shock. 

“Lesson number one,” Tony said in his ear as they entered the establishment. “Just because the place has the word ‘ballroom’ in it, doesn’t make it classy.”

The throngs of people were concentrated on the sizable dance floor on the left and the well-stocked bar on the right, and before Bucky had gathered himself enough to move, Steve and Natasha were already returning with drinks. “Having fun yet?” she said with a grin, but out of the corner of his eye he was watching Steve watch him. He took a shot of the brown liquid thatwas pushed in front of him and it went down with a spicy cinnamon kick. 

“Of course.” He threw on a smirk that could have been taken straight from the Smithsonian newsreels.

Natasha and Tony dragged him over to the pulsating mob of people dancing under the laser lights, ignoring Bucky’s questions about why the song was talking about the ceiling not being able to hold them (“What are they, on the roof? It doesn’t make any sense.”). Steve stayed back with Bruce and nursed his vodka cranberry. 

“Has Tony made fun of you for that yet?” Bruce chuckled, and Steve raised his eyebrows in an “oh yes,” keeping his eye on Bucky. 

He was already dancing with a girl, clearing a large swath of the dance floor by adapting the jitterbug to the beat of what Steve’s proud to recognize as an Ellie Goulding remix. There wasn’t anyone in the vicinity who can steer their gaze away from the anachronistic dance, Bucky’s deadly-charming smile. Steve grinned into his drink. 

Three songs and three girls later, Bucky ran back up to Steve and Bruce, half breathless and the shiny sheen of sweat lining his hairline. “C’mon, Rogers, you don’t even have to know how to dance nowadays!” He was tugging at his wrist. 

“Thanks, Buck.”

“I’m just saying.” He grabbed the last two shots off their tray and handed one to Steve. “Please? I want you out there with me. When did we ever get to dance together proper before they zapped your asthma away?” 

So they took the shots and Steve followed him to a pocket he carved out on the far side of the dance floor, away from where he could see Tony and Natasha’s heads bobbing in the crowd. He didn’t recognize the song that faded in, the bass thumping too forcefully over the words. 

He was trying to take it all in that he almost didn’t notice when Bucky’s shoulder blades came flush up against his chest. Key word being almost. 

“Bucky--”

“I’ve got to teach you how to dance again,” he laughed. “Nothing I taught you back in Brooklyn will do you any good now.”

“You seemed to be doing all right.” Bucky laughed again and pulled Steve’s hands to his hips. “I thought I didn’t need to know how to dance.”

“Don’t rain on my parade.”

So maybe Bucky was a little drunk--not that drunk, they’ve all seen him that drunk--but Steve couldn’t quite finish his train of thought because Bucky was grinding into him, reaching around with his flesh-and-bone arm to hold the back of Steve’s neck and he could feel Bucky’s nails lightly dragging across his skin and his hips guiding his own movements, teaching him through touch alone, so different from the halting awkward step explanations in their cramped apartment before the war. 

This never would have flied in the dance halls of their youth. For so many reasons.

Bucky tilted his head up, face dangerously close to Steve’s--when had he started leaning into him, when had his cheek started grazing his ear?--and he murmured, “You’re getting the hang of it.” 

Steve felt his arm start snaking up Bucky’s chest as the song changed, another remix, Beyonce this time, and Bucky’s sigh was so rough that it dragged Steve’s mouth to his neck. He pulled away for breath, and when he dove back down he found Bucky’s mouth instead. 

Their lips moved carefully, dragging slowly against each other with a lack of urgency no one could have guessed from their hands tightly pulling them into each other. Bucky’s tongue licked cautiously into Steve’s mouth and they threw the act away, kissing hungrily, fumbling to face each other and drag their mouths back together. Bucky’s hands were glued to Steve’s face and clawing lightly at the edge of his ears, his breaths hot and shaky as they hit the back of his throat. 

As Steve’s hands reached down to Bucky’s ass, someone coughed. And then coughed again. “I hate to interrupt…” 

Tony was holding his phone screen inches from their barely-separated faces--there was an all-caps message from Fury about an emergency situation in Georgetown. 

They meandered quickly through the crowd and out of the club, dead-focused on the mission ahead and willing the alcohol from their bloodstreams, but Steve and Bucky’s fingers never untangled. Outside of a minute grin from Natasha, no one mentioned it.

x.

The next time Bruce walks by Steve and Bucky’s apartment, “First Day of My Life” slips from under the cracked door, the singing smooth and chords confident, and he sees the movement of two sets of feet.


End file.
